Sanding Stained Wood – Tips & Techniques
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No matter how gorgeous that deck or piece of furniture looks right now, at some point, it’s going to get dull, and you are probably going to want to remove the stain and refinish the wood. Unfortunately, sanding stained wood is a notoriously difficult proposition for inexperienced carpenters or hobby woodwork enthusiasts.
That, however, doesn’t mean that it can’t be or shouldn’t be done. You need to know the right steps and ways to go about it. Here are some excellent tips on how to sanding stained wood.
Tips for Sanding Stained Wood
First things first: you need to know that wood stain is tremendously difficult to remove from wood. Some types dye the wood surface while others go deeper by carrying the pigment into the pores.
The most effective solution when it comes to removing a stain from wood is to remove the top layer of the wood until you get to where there is no stain. This calls for sanding, and there are several approaches to this:
- Manually sanding wood with the right sandpaper
- Sanding wood using a sander
Depending on which method you choose, the process is quite typically the same albeit of different physical exertion on your part. Let’s take a look at the steps you need to take to successfully sand stained wood surface:
Removing Stain from Finished Wood
There is a very good chance that you are going to be removing a stain from finished wood. For the most part, you will find that it has a film-forming topcoat such as varnish or lacquer. If this is the case, you will have to remove this coating first.
Step 1: Use a Stripper
This topcoat tends to be even more notoriously difficult to remove than the stain itself. Considering how tedious this job would be otherwise, it’s best to use a chemical stripper. Using chemical strippers is fairly easy; all you have to do is follow the instructions as written on the bottle. Typically, that involves:
- Apply a layer on top of the wood to be stripped
- Giving the stripper about three to five minutes to gel on the topcoat
- Once it’s gelled sufficiently, scrape it off with a flat stick
That should get the topcoat off the piece of wood you are working on. Unfortunately, this chemical stripper will not work on removing the stain.
Step 2: Give the Wood Time to Dry
Once you have removed all the topcoat and chemical stripper from the wood, you need to give it time to dry off. This usually takes about four hours. At this time, the wood should look rather bare, displaying its natural color. In some cases, you will see some dark streaks where the stain has penetrated a little deeper into the wood. If this is present, then you still have some ways to go.
Step 3: Sand the Wood
Sanding the wood after stripping the topcoat takes on a lot of different variations. If you are going to do it manually, then you will need to decide which sandpaper to use. For the most part, you are going to want to stick to 100-grit sandpaper. This is what most professional craftsmen, production woodworkers and cabinet shops rely on to get the job done properly.
It is, however, true that most woodworkers believe in using finer grit sandpapers (above 200-grit). While this works just as well, the problem is that it works you to death. It will be much harder to sand any piece of wood with finer grit sandpaper. Additionally, they tend to fill up with gunk, cause stain to look blotchy as well as polish the wood.
You might wonder then: why can’t you use lower grit sandpaper? You could use lower grit sandpaper (anything lower than 100, even 60 to 80-grit). In fact, the argument for using lower grit sandpaper is quite solid: it removes more material much faster, which is exactly what you want especially when dealing with a stain that has gone deeper into the wood grains.
The problem with this approach is that lower grit sandpaper does it too well and goes on to scratch the wood or even cut it. Which means you would have to use finer grit sandpaper to polish the wood later, which doubles your workload.
So, what do you do? How do you sand the wood? The process is simple enough. Simply attach your 100-grit sandpaper to a hard rubber hand-sanding block and slowly begin stroking the wood with it. How much effort you use here will depend on the type of stain you are trying to sand off.
When dealing with a pigmented stain, you will find that the sanding block builds up with gunk after a few minutes of sanding. In this case, you will have to change the sandpaper immediately it builds up with gunk. Keep changing it as many times as it takes until you get the job done. If you are dealing with a dye-based stain, then you won’t have to change your sanding paper quite as often.
Always Go with the Grain
Even though this is sanding 101, it’s important to always reiterate this point. For your sanding to work effectively, always go parallel with the grain. Sanding perpendicularly will only result in unwanted scratches to the wood which will prove just as notoriously difficult to remove as the stain.
Use the natural back and forth motion while moving the sanding block about 4 to 6 inches with each pass. Focus on small, 6 inch sections on the wood at a time. Once that spot becomes smooth and devoid of stain, move on to the next 6-inch section. This working in manageable sections while slightly overlapping them with each go will give you a smooth overall finish and a piece of wood furniture that is stain free.
These are the simple steps you need to follow to sand stained wood. Sanding stained wood is painstaking work, but once you have the right materials and go about it the right way, it’s quite doable.